spINAch: A Diachronic Corpus of French Broadcast Speech Controlled for Speakers' Age and Gender

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Devauchelle, Simon, Doukhan, David, Uro, Rémi, Yang, Lucas Ondel, Pelloin, Valentin, Imbert-Brégégère, Olympia, Lefort, Véronique, Picard, Kévin, Seignobos, Emeline, Rilliard, Albert
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Devauchelle, Simon
Doukhan, David
Uro, Rémi
Yang, Lucas Ondel
Pelloin, Valentin
Imbert-Brégégère, Olympia
Lefort, Véronique
Picard, Kévin
Seignobos, Emeline
Rilliard, Albert
author_facet Devauchelle, Simon
Doukhan, David
Uro, Rémi
Yang, Lucas Ondel
Pelloin, Valentin
Imbert-Brégégère, Olympia
Lefort, Véronique
Picard, Kévin
Seignobos, Emeline
Rilliard, Albert
contents We present spINAch, a large diachronic corpus of French speech from radio and television archives, balanced by speakers' gender, age (20-95 years old), and spanning 60 years from 1955 to 2015. The dataset includes over 320 hours of recordings from more than two thousand speakers. The methodology for building the corpus is described, focusing on the quality of collected samples in acoustic terms. The data were automatically transcribed and phonetically aligned to allow studies at a phonemic level. More than 3 million oral vowels have been analyzed to propose their fundamental frequency and formants. The corpus, available to the community for research purposes, is valuable for describing the evolution of Parisian French through the representation of gender and age. The presented analyses also demonstrate that the diachronic nature of the corpus allows the observation of various phonetic phenomena, such as the evolution of voice pitch over time (which does not differ by gender in our data) and the neutralization of the /a/-/$a$/ opposition in Parisian French during this period.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15516
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle spINAch: A Diachronic Corpus of French Broadcast Speech Controlled for Speakers' Age and Gender
Devauchelle, Simon
Doukhan, David
Uro, Rémi
Yang, Lucas Ondel
Pelloin, Valentin
Imbert-Brégégère, Olympia
Lefort, Véronique
Picard, Kévin
Seignobos, Emeline
Rilliard, Albert
Audio and Speech Processing
We present spINAch, a large diachronic corpus of French speech from radio and television archives, balanced by speakers' gender, age (20-95 years old), and spanning 60 years from 1955 to 2015. The dataset includes over 320 hours of recordings from more than two thousand speakers. The methodology for building the corpus is described, focusing on the quality of collected samples in acoustic terms. The data were automatically transcribed and phonetically aligned to allow studies at a phonemic level. More than 3 million oral vowels have been analyzed to propose their fundamental frequency and formants. The corpus, available to the community for research purposes, is valuable for describing the evolution of Parisian French through the representation of gender and age. The presented analyses also demonstrate that the diachronic nature of the corpus allows the observation of various phonetic phenomena, such as the evolution of voice pitch over time (which does not differ by gender in our data) and the neutralization of the /a/-/$a$/ opposition in Parisian French during this period.
title spINAch: A Diachronic Corpus of French Broadcast Speech Controlled for Speakers' Age and Gender
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15516